Teddy went home and ran a search for Nigel Hightower III. Nigel had dropped out of Oxford his junior year after getting involved in some sort of scandal that his father, Nigel Hightower Jr., managed to hush up. He had run afoul of the law, but the records were sealed. It took Teddy half an hour to unseal them. He would have been faster, but hacking British agencies and parsing the differences in their legal system slowed him down.
Nigel had been caught with an underage girl and two grams of cocaine. What Daddy had to pay to get him out of that one, Teddy could only imagine.
Teddy followed Nigel’s trail to New York, where the young man maintained a permanent address for thirteen months, probably until Daddy cut him off. He had no reported income during that time.
Teddy next found a plane ticket to Vegas, charged against a credit card that was subsequently invalidated. Another credit card got him a hotel room at the MGM Grand, before it was revoked for lack of payment a month later.
No further credit cards were issued to Nigel Hightower, so he’d changed his name, won big, or gotten killed.
Teddy ran a global search on his name and began the tedious task of sifting through worthless responses. It was about an hour before he found a Facebook post by an Eliot Clark: “You’ll never guess who I saw on the streets of L.A. Nigel Hightower. I was on a tour bus and he was walking along, but I’m sure it was him. Small world.”
The post was only two weeks old.
Nigel was in L.A.